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2 weeks recording and _{mixing with} 14 nights at the VH1’ Black Francis in ^{Comfort Inn} _{Salem, Oregon} s Celebrity art Brut vs. Rehab ⁼ Satan

The Big Tease

How the sunset strip came to the great White Way

Blue-haired ladies of a different stripe are descending on Broadway this spring. Rock of Ages, a musical that opened last month after a successful off-Broadway run, is a send-up of hair metal that fittingly started three years ago at a hollywood Boulevard club. The plot will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Behind the Music: drew, a wannabe rocker (played by American Idol finalist Constantine Maroulis), works at a club on the

sunset strip where he hopes to make it big, or at least open for Poison. There, he meets sherrie, a small-town girl (livin’ in a lonely world) and struggling actress, and dennis, the club’s financially embattled owner. enter stacee Jaxx, an egotistical rock star whose band, arsenal, arrives to play a benefit gig. Complications, if not venereal diseases, ensue.

The musical features 30 hits from the era, including Whitesnake’s “here i Go again” and “heaven,” by Warrant. Chris

d’arienzo, the show’s writer, spent untold hours listening to everyone from Journey to forgotten acts like Y&T—a task that was initially difficult for the former skate punk from Paw Paw, Michigan. “This music reminded me of guys wanting to kick my ass,” d’arienzo says. But he quickly recognized that Appetite for Destruction is a great album, “even though i was pushed into a locker while it was playing.”

Former Warrant singer Jani lane saw the show at a pre-Broadway run in l.a.

and says the clichéd plot rings true. “i was one of those guys—i got out here in ’ 85,” he says. “One second, i’m in Florida playing in a cover band. The next, i’m standing on hollywood Boulevard.” lane was secretly a musical theater buff in high school, acting in The Fantasticks and The Pajama Game, and he’s thrilled that one of his songs is featured. “if somebody told me in my 20s that a song i wrote would be on Broadway, i’d have laughed my ass off,” he says. STEVEN KURUTZ

The Album
Recipe
Art Brut’s Eddie Argos
reveals how they
cooked up Art Brut
vs. Satan

1 open-mic
night perform-
ance of Weezer
songs at a
local bar

14 breakfasts
of sausage
gravy on
English muffins

1 song with
the spray
sound from a
deodorant can

“When you hear records growing up, you always presume the band was in a room, playing together. We did that. It was brilliant. I think we remembered that we were punks for this one. again for a third time, the theme is me. It’s always me, I suppose, isn’t it? I’m very vain.”

32 may 2009 / get smarter. go to sPIN.Com

illUSTRaTioNS BY (fRom Top) Jimm Y TURREll, hENNiE hawoRTh